Bacon’s Rebellion (1676) in Virginia was the largest uprising in the Thirteen Colonies before the time of the American Revolution a hundred years later. It was a failed attempt to overthrow the rich landowners who ruled Virginia. After the rebellion, the rich maintained their power by dividing the bottom 99% by race. It became the model for US society.
In 1676, Nathaniel Bacon led a “Rabble Crew”, “an incredible Number of the meanest People”, “English and Negroes in Armes”, whose “fortunes & Inclinations” were “desperate”. They marched on Jamestown, the capital, and burned it to the ground. The governor, William Berkeley, fled, asking the king across the sea to send his soldiers.
Berkeley had long feared this moment. He said of Virginians:
“six parts of seaven at least are Poore Endebted Discontented and Armed.”
Tobacco was Virginia’s big moneymaker. It took huge amounts of land and labour, creating a few big landowners. Virginia was only allowed to sell tobacco to British merchants, who kept prices low. In the late 1600s, most indentured servants started to outlive their contracts, creating a large number of free, poor, landless men. Most had guns.
By the 1660s there was the beginnings of the colour line, but it was weak: poor Whites and Blacks were used to working together, living together, running away together, having families together – and fighting together. Whites did not even call themselves “whites”, not till the 1670s.
To keep peace with the Indians (Native Americans), Berkeley built a line of forts to prevent Virginians from taking Native land to the west. Bacon, like many in backcountry Virginia, opposed this.
In 1675, fighting broke out with the Susquehannock Indians. Bacon felt that Berkeley’s defence of Virginia was half-hearted, so he raised an army of his own. Berkeley accused Bacon of treason. Bacon’s army marched on the capital.
Bacon controlled nearly all of Virginia when, suddenly, he died at age 29 of the bloody flux (dysentery, bloody diarrhoea). The king’s men arrived and put down the rebellion.
After the rebellion, the rich maintained their power by creating what, in effect, was a three-race model of society:
- Blacks, people of African blood, would provide slave labour. Virginia moved from using Black and White indentured servants and slaves to mainly using Black slaves. The civil rights of even free Blacks became limited. Any child a White person had with a Black person would become a slave – the One Drop Rule.
- Natives would provide land to create White wealth and buy social peace among Whites. Natives were painted as the enemy of Whites.
- Whites, people of pure European blood, would enjoy what rich landowners like Washington and Jefferson would later call “liberty” and “equality” – paid for by Black slave labour and Native land. Natives and Blacks provide an Other that brings rich and poor Whites together.
- Poor Whites would provide the armed manpower to maintain the social order, by serving in Indian wars and slave patrols. Pushing Blacks to the bottom of society gave poor Whites a stake in the social order.
– Abagond, 2015.
Sources:
- Ronald Takaki, “A Different Mirror” (2008);
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” (2014);
- Samuel Eliot Morrison, “The Oxford History of the American People” (1972);
- Daniel K. Richter, “Facing East From Indian Country: A Native History of Early America” (2001);
- Audrey and Brian D. Smedley, “Race in North America” (2012);
- Howard Zinn, “A People’s History of the United States” (2003);
- Online Etymology Dictionary
See also:
- Welcome to Black History Month 2015
- White racism in the 1600s against:
- slave patrols
- One Drop Rule
- Jefferson
- Washington
- Melungeons – a mixed-race people who left Virginia in the late 1600s and early 1700s
- white racial frame
- Southern strategy
Amazing…years ago I heard only a tiny bit about this but thanks to Abagond I’m hearing what really went on back in the day before the current mess regarding race that we’re in now. Thanks for the education and much obliged.
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“Any child a White person had with a Black person would become a slave – the One Drop Rule.”
Actually, there was a class of people, the Free Persons of Color, who were largely the children of white servant women. The FPC’s occupied an odd niche in colonial life. Obviously, they were free, some became prosperous and were socially accepted by whites to varying degrees, at least early on.
Eventually laws were passed against those unions and the women having such children would be hauled into court and prosecuted as whores. Their children would be indentured out, though they were not subject to hereditary slavery. Remember, hereditary slavery was inherited through the mother. The One Drop Rule applied to those whose white ancestry came through the male line.
I believe there is something innate in human psychology that makes it very difficult to objectify your daughter’s children. You can objectify your son’s bastards, but not your daughter’s babies. That child would become a part of your family, and your village. You can’t objectify that child, (You can’t even use that as an excuse not to vote for him if he decides to run for president.)
An entire village would be ruined for racism by one beautiful little bi-racial child. It had to be stopped. That’s why those mothers were being hauled into court and prosecuted as whores. Without that tobacco money made via slave labor there would be no revolution, no Birth of a Nation.
As several generations of whites became increasingly complicit in the profits derived from hereditary slavery, the law became taboo and ran itself, as it does to the present day.
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What kind of society did Bacon want to set up once he had power? Otherwise it seems like the typical story of him using the oppressed to fight for his own gain.
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He had no real idea. He was the governor’s errant nephew, a failed fur trader who hated the Indians because they were preventing whites like him from taking over the business.
The rebellion was more like a riot. Some idiot planter, Matthews, started the whole business by cheating some Indians in a deal, so they settled it in their own fashion by acquiring one of his hogs. He responded by having one of his goons kill the guy who stole the hog. So that debt had to be settled. Things got out of hand, and the authorities came after the Indians (was it Doegs?).
They did what all the tribes were doing at the time, which was to shift the blame onto the Susquehannock, who were a bunch of PTSD’d refugees from, you guessed it, the Susquehannock in PA. The Swiss had traded them cannons for furs and upset the arms race that was devouring everyone. That meant every tribe and his cousin’s tribe came after the Susquehannock, at the same time smallpox hit them, and now they were down to a few crazy belligerent stragglers trying to hang on. They were wiped out here in Clarksville, VA on an island just below Kerr Lake dam, called Buggs Island. Some say it’s haunted. Tons of eagles nest there.
Anyway, as the gov’s nephew, Bacon got pulled into it by the mob. The attention went to his head. His only agenda seemed to be to get rid of the tribes that had stood in the way of his ambitions. He got sick while hiding in a swamp. He became infested with lice or some other kind of vermin that were tormenting him, so he went out in agony and fever. Having precipated the genocide of both the Susquehannah survivors and the Occaneechee, ending the sovereignty of all the Saponi Nations of NC and VA, it was just deserts.
I was way into this ten-fifteen years ago. I did some gig for William & Mary and digitized most of the original source material. I still have it all up, along with an article I wrote, on an old defunct site of mine,
http://www.greattradingpath.com/native-american-indian-history/index.htm
The Great Trading Path used to run right by my house when the fur trade was monopolized by the Occoneechee, who lived on an island here. It ran all the way from Maine to Florida. Highway One.
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@ minda45-great points about the One Drop Rule and how it generally applied to the male line (not the woman’s), this is what I have always been taught-and I think you’re probably onto something about the acceptance of a woman’s offspring vs. that of a man’s, however I shall look into researching this topic more before I reach a concrete decision about it..
@ Speak Out-that is exactly what I would like to know more about as well, did Bacon intend to dispense/share power with those who fought alongside him or were they being exploited for his own personal gain-what I wouldn’t give to know the absolute, honest truth about this subject as well!
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There is a myth taken for granted that privilege is earned—when it is actually something that is stolen (or in some cases, given). If we understand this structure of privilege then it follows that those without this privilege have the right to demand that those with privilege have the obligation to share it.
If all human beings are of equal worth then those who have privilege are not entitled to it….They have been given it by circumstance (either arbitrary or deliberate). Thus, those who have not been given privilege by circumstance have the right to demand a share of the benefits of that privilege. This is a Human Right.
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Linda,
You said in your post:
“I believe there is something innate in human psychology that makes it very difficult to objectify your daughter’s children. You can objectify your son’s bastards, but not your daughter’s babies. That child would become a part of your family, and your village. You can’t objectify that child, (You can’t even use that as an excuse not to vote for him if he decides to run for president.)”
Is that why nonblack mothers of multiracial children pushed for the multiracial category back in the 90s?
Stephaniegirl
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[…] Bacon’s Rebellion. […]
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@Linda Keres Carter
Thanks for the info. Do you study other topics in Native American history?
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@Minda45 and @Mz. Nikita
I’d think it’s also about male supremacy in general. White men could have illegitimate children of the same race back then and force their wives to race the children as their own, but if their wives cheated they were forced to give the child away.
@Mz. Nikita
From what Linda Keres Carter says, it seems like Bacon’s Rebellion is promoted as an important event for people of color just because it shows how people of color and white people joined forces against their common oppressors, and that the racial classifications we have now were created by the rich whites in power in reaction to it.
@anon
I agree we’re all essentially equal and all entitled equally to the good things in life, but we can’t all partake in privilege by its very nature. I.E. how can we all partake of white supremacy? We need instead to reorganize society so that it is not made up of binaries of superior/inferior along every social category.
@Stephaniegirl
I think you’re right to question that because there have been plenty of examples of men throwing out their own daughters for having illegitimate children or murdering them in “honor killings” etc.
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“Is that why nonblack mothers of multiracial children pushed for the multiracial category back in the 90s?”
I don’t know. I didn’t hear about all that until it was already a done deal. Such mothers are a very, very small population who are really isolated from each other, I just know that I liked it when we could check off as many boxes as we liked, though I witnessed school personnel only interested in the Black check mark. Apparently grant money was at stake. I was living in a rural county 40% Black that relied heaviliy on federal money. I assumed that’s what that was about.
“Do you study other topics in Native American history?”
I spent about ten years heavily involved in researching Eastern Siouan (Saponi) history when I traced some descent on my mom’s side back to them. Just by coincidence my ex had the same thing going on, eventually he got hooked too. It was a big family thing. I have a site up some younger long, lost cousins are still working, http://saponitown.com. The forum is huge. Lots of history there. The Blackfoot article is what made it popular. I just had a historian who’s a status Indian tell me that my research was flawed (not that he read any of it) and that story in a family just means (note the ‘just’ word) they had Black blood they were trying to hide. I thought that was really amusing.
Last week one of those cousins informed me that we have two Quaker cousins who rode with John Brown. One got hung with him, the other escaped via the Underground Railroad, then died as a Union soldier when a bridge was blown up.
“From what Linda Keres Carter says, it seems like Bacon’s Rebellion is promoted as an important event for people of color just because it shows how people of color and white people joined forces against their common oppressors, and that the racial classifications we have now were created by the rich whites in power in reaction to it.”
Actually, I see Bacon’s Rebellion as basically a precursor to the Klan, a vigilante mob mentality grasping what it wants for itself because it has the brute force to do so. I always thought it outrageous that a movie called “The Birth of a Nation” was about the Klan. It was actually audaciously honest that racists were referring to it as such. Bacon’s Rebellion is clearly a tale of a bunch of ignorant, half drunk White rabble-rousers exterminating two tribes and terrorizing a number of others because they were tired of having their own personal ambitions thwarted accommodating them. I never processed the story in terms of its impact on Black/White status issues, I saw it as a story of racial genocide on Native populations.
Bacon intimidated the Occoneechee into attacking the Susquehannah refugees they’d allowed to live on an island downstream who’d worn out their welcome, holding some related Siouan hostage. They killed the warriors and sent the women and children to the Meherrin. Some tried to say it was just trigger happy tensions that started the violence on the Occoneechee the next day, but it was clear from Bacon’s own mouth that he intended what happened. The Occoneechee were viciously exterminated, mowed down, men, women and children. This cleared half the Piedmont of Virginia and North Carolina for White expansion.
If anything, the Whites in power learned how useful that rabble could be in clearing out the Native peoples. They instigated the war on the Tuscarora in the next generation by removing their policing of White skalawags when the Tuscarora refused to sell their pine forests. The pine forests of North Carolina were a treasure in maritime supplies, uncommonly tall masts (a technological breakthrough if you will), tar and turpentine. It can be argued that Britain came to rule the waves because she acquired those forests.
Those forests were a huge food supply for the Tuscarora. America had no indigenous animals adaptable as livestock (or draft animals, that’s why no wheels were in use). So, Indians became expert in forestry management. Meat was hunted not raised. They would have never sold those forests. When they refused, you can see the restraints being removed from the evil characters stealing children into slavery and debauching people into alcoholism. Mess like that provoking a war. Which came in 1713 when the Tuscarora attacked New Bern. So the excuse was found to exterminate the Tuscarora. Survivors escaped to the Five Nations, which then became the Six Nations.
I lived a few miles from Fort Neoheroka, where they had their last stand. That’s where my interest started. I was just thinking the other day about the blue and white vase stolen from New Bern found at the fort and glued back together. The bill of lading still exists showing it’s purchase from Europe. I can’t glue broken pottery without thinking about it.
Oh, I just remembered something. Fort Neoheroka was built like a European fort. A Black man, an escaped slave, designed it, and supervised its construction. He was part of the leadership. He was captured and brutally executed. What a story.
Also, excavation revealed a tunnel. Everyone there could have escaped the night before, but everyone chose to remain.
Thanks for asking, it was good remembering all this.
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“@anon–I agree we’re all essentially equal and all entitled equally to the good things in life, but we can’t all partake in privilege by its very nature. I.E. how can we all partake of white supremacy? We need instead to reorganize society so that it is not made up of binaries of superior/inferior along every social category.”
—If we assume that “privilege” is circumstantial—that is, a person of a certain genetic make-up, or family background, or social circumstance….will have more success in a particular area—-Then to dismantle “privilege” is an exercise in futility….What we need to do is to acknowledge the inevitability of privilege in human society but change the paradigm from entitlement to responsibility/obligation and compassion. Thus, those who have privilege because of circumstances—have more obligations to their fellow human beings than those who have less privilege….therefore, taxes from the privileged rightfully belong to the less privileged in society. The priority and obligation in government spending, as well as charities, and religious spending, must be on the welfare of the less privileged because they are entitled to it.
Without such a paradigm, systemic discrimination becomes normal/justified. For ex—apparently in the U.S. public schools are funded by property taxes…creating inequality between wealthy areas and poor districts…?…If this is the case…it is because of the “narrative’ that those who pay more taxes are more “entitled”–this is wrong.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/20/school-funding-practices-_n_1612572.html
In some countries a more harsher, less compassionate treatment of the less privileged is becoming the “norm”—called defensive architecture—-
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/18/defensive-architecture-keeps-poverty-undeen-and-makes-us-more-hostile?CMP=fb_gu
Without compassion for our fellow human beings—can we be human?
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“After the rebellion, the rich maintained their power by creating what, in effect, was a three-race model of society:
• Blacks, people of African blood, would provide slave labour. Virginia moved from using Black and White indentured servants and slaves to mainly using Black slaves. The civil rights of even free Blacks became limited. Any child a White person had with a Black person would become a slave – the One Drop Rule.”
*******************************************************************************************
I cannot find any reference to the one drop rule until the 20th century.
Could you please identify the documents that established the one drop theory in 1600 or 1700?
The one drop rule 1910 to 1934 was declared unconstitutional.
“My understanding of the race rule is the child followed the mother’s race, thus White women would have a White baby even if the father was black.”
Is this “the one drop rule” a possible desire of the Black Power group? If so I will not pursue it any further!
“Today there are few enforceable laws in the U.S. in which the one-drop rule is applicable. Sociologically, however, the concept remains somewhat pervasive, used by people of both European and African descent.”
“[If a one-drop rule were adopted], I doubt not, if many who are reputed to be white, and are in fact so, do not in a very short time find themselves instead of being elevated, reduced by the judgment of a court of competent jurisdiction, to the level of a free negro.[5]:230
“Delegates debated a proposal for a one-drop rule to include in these laws. George D. Tillman said the following in opposition:
If the law is made as it now stands respectable families in Aiken, Barnwell, Colleton, and Orangeburg will be denied the right to intermarry among people with whom they are now associated and identified. At least one hundred families would be affected to my knowledge. They have sent good soldiers to the Confederate Army, and are now landowners and taxpayers. Those men served creditably, and it would be unjust and disgraceful to embarrass them in this way. It is a scientific fact that there is not one full-blooded Caucasian on the floor of this convention. Every member has in him a certain mixture of… colored blood. The pure-blooded white has needed and received a certain infusion of darker blood to give him readiness and purpose. It would be a cruel injustice and the source of endless litigation, of scandal, horror, feud, and bloodshed to undertake to annul or forbid marriage for a remote, perhaps obsolete trace of Negro blood. The doors would be open to scandal, malice, and greed; to statements on the witness stand that the father or grandfather or grandmother had said that A or B had Negro blood in their veins. Any man who is half a man would be ready to blow up half the world with dynamite to prevent or avenge attacks upon the honor of his mother in the legitimacy or purity of the blood of his father.[4][10]
On the other hand, the Black Power Movement and some leaders within the black community also claimed as black those persons with any visible African ancestry, to extend their political base and regardless of how those people self-identified. In the late 20th and early 21st century, writers such as A.D. Powell, who is multiracial, consider such “claiming” to be another kind of one-drop rule, which ignores people’s life “experiences, their community, and how they choose to identify themselves.[16] The number of self-identified multi-racial people in the US is increasing.
Mixed-race children of white mothers were born free, and many families of free people of color were started in those years. 80 percent of the free African-American families in the Upper South in the censuses of 1790 to 1810 can be traced as descendants of unions between white women and African men in colonial Virginia, not of slave women and white men. In the early colony, conditions were loose among the working class, who lived and worked closely together. After the American Revolutionary War, their free mixed-race descendants migrated to the frontiers of nearby states along with other primarily European Virginia pioneers.[23] The admixture also reflects later conditions under slavery, when white planters or their sons, or overseers, frequently used African women for sex.[24] There were also freely chosen relationships among individuals of different or mixed races.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_diaspora
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@ All-good points and observations being raised here!
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@Allen
Consider the following:
====
My $0.02:
African Americans have always been a mixed race people. Malcolm X had so much “White” his hair was red, as was the hair of my 2nd great grandmother. Historically, we’ve been far more receptive to including Blk/Wht mixed people into our community than White Americans have been. Of course, it’s no skin off my nose if such people don’t want to claim Blackness.
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Thanks for the post. Great as usual. However may I suggest a post on another person of interest : Robert Carter III a contemporary of and relative of Jefferson, and Washington who freed about 500 slaves due to his own conviction. This act was the largest emancipation of slaves prior to the civil war( late 1700’s). Upset with false Anglican piety of the day, he built a church where whites and free blacks were equal. This man disappeared from history although he had the great wealth and a great pedigree. His convictions and motivations were greater than Lincolns. His deeds and convictions were at odds with his family and community…that is real strength.
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@Linda Keres Carter
I was referring to why Bacon’s Rebellion is taught in Ethnic Studies. I know we had to read A Different Mirror. I don’t remember any mention of the things you’ve brought up, and I think Takaki left it out because he wanted to promote the things I said.
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Jacque: ” may I suggest a post on another person of interest : Robert Carter III”
You’re right. That guy was amazing, and so isolated. I read the Wiki on him and expected to see him influenced by someone, but I didn’t see that. He just cooked up his values on his own, it appears.
speak out “I don’t remember any mention of the things you’ve brought up, and I think Takaki left it out because he wanted to promote the things I said.”
I don’t think there was anything in the original testimonies about the events that would indicate Bacon had any kind of far-reaching grasp of what was going on. Poor whites attacking or controlling non-Whites was something that took on a life of its own, fueled mainly by their own individual ambitions to acquire more for themselves. Bacon didn’t master mind it. He was a small-minded man pushed to the forefront by a mob.
That mob went on to create a fantasy world that applauded their ‘quest for liberty.’ The opposite story to the Robert Carter story. Theirs is a story about a mass psychosis enabling a mob to do immoral things, convincing one another that it’s virtuous. You’ll have a whole population in that state shunning somebody like Carter who persists in seeing clearly.
It’s probably letting the ‘rabble’ off too easy to say they were being duped by the powerful. Each one of those poor men would have a personal stake in stealing the Native lands, and being in a world where they were no longer the bottom rung in the social order. They’re all enabling each other and turning it into a patriotic tune.
I’ve tried to watch “Birth of a Nation” but it’s too gross. I can’t stomach it. The mass psychosis is so bizarre.
The truth is, most humans will opt for the mass psychosis if it will benefit them. People like Carter are the exceptions. Sometimes they change things, most of the time they just disappear.
The truth is, White people didn’t land on America’s shores, in the beginning, looking to ransack it. When explorers landed and planted their country’s flag, that meant they were claiming trading rights to the exclusion of other European countries. But enormously epidemic diseases created an illusion that the place was empty and ripe for the taking, and a natural disaster in Africa (desertificaiton) was devastating environments and crashing populations into each other. That made life very cheap and easily sold. And once all that ‘opportunity’ starts dancing in Everyman’s eyes they each give each other permission to go for it.
Very ugly and very universal aspect of human nature. And if you’re in a group who thinks they’re above all that, that’s just another mass psychosis running.
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Poor, Endebted, Discontented, and Armed should be an album title.
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